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Is NB lapping a must?

T

TerryG

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 28, 2003
Messages
265
I'm getting ready to replace the dying NB fan on my NF7-S with one of the copper dealies from vantec, and wanted to know if lapping my northbridge is an absolute must. I plan on using Arctic Alumina, and I only overclock a little (I usually increase the FSB from 166 to 181 or so).

I've seen a lot of people recommend lapping, but I'd rather not take the chance of killing my board if I don't have too.
 
Wow.... i haven't heard ppl talk about lapping in years! With a lot of the north bridges, even though they aren't 100% flat, I'm sure u can get away with not lapping it. From what I've seen, most motherboards overclock fine, even with stock passive cooling.

If you're really hard core though, and you've already volt modded ur video card, put on some crazy watercooling, then I'd say go for it, but if your just doing some basic bios ocing, then I wouldn't bother. U probably won't see any improvement anyways.

So in short, no, lapping isn't a must. And also no, lapping will not kill ur board :p Just don't use a grinder and grind it until you see the transistors... then you went too far.
 
That kind of what I thought, just wanted to get some additional feedback. The only reason I mentioned killing my board is because I have a bad habit of not stopping once I'm done, if that makes sense.
 
TerryG said:
That kind of what I thought, just wanted to get some additional feedback. The only reason I mentioned killing my board is because I have a bad habit of not stopping once I'm done, if that makes sense.
Click to expand...

Yeah.... I did that once.... lapped my Radeon LE so far down, cuz I kept thinking it wasn't as flat as it could be..... i actually started to see some tracing..... I stopped there :p
 
i dont think its needed unless your to the point where your using phasechange or waterchilling to do extreme overclocking. its not like theres a heat spreader or anything on NB's its just the die. im not sure about amd systems, but on an intel system they say that passive cooling on the NB is good till bout 250fsb, anything above that and a larger active cooler is recommended. i have a waterblock on mine with my bus at 284mhz, but i think i could get away with using the stock cooler from abit.
 
acascianelli said:
i dont think its needed unless your to the point where your using phasechange or waterchilling to do extreme overclocking. its not like theres a heat spreader or anything on NB's its just the die. im not sure about amd systems, but on an intel system they say that passive cooling on the NB is good till bout 250fsb, anything above that and a larger active cooler is recommended. i have a waterblock on mine with my bus at 284mhz, but i think i could get away with using the stock cooler from abit.
Click to expand...

on AMD systems, the northbridge is in a nasty uneven packaging...

i lapped mine on all my setups
 
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